Sorry Clint, but this piece of wood has fooled your eye. What you think is grain (actually, the annular rings) isnt its figure. The grain is completely obscured by the figure in that piece of wood. Highly figured wood can fool the eye into thinking it sees something that isnt really there, and thats what just happened here.
I spent many years as a stock maker, and specialized in top end, highly figured wood. I can appreciate how easy it is for anyone without a great deal of experience with that kind of wood to be tricked by that stock.
On a closely related subject, the stock blank in that picture I posted (Chiron blank # s382) is another example of a highly figured blank in which the figure makes the annular rings hard to see. That blank looks like it has annular rings going every which-a-way, but is actually a rift sawn blank just slightly off quarter sawn, with grain flow straight as a ruler from head to within a few inches of butt, where it takes a slight drift to the toe. Thats a structure not visible from the photo. With that kind of wood a stocker has to have the actual wood in hand and time to figure out how its actually structured.
